Jerry Harper Service Award

The 2026 Jerry Harper Service Award is being presented to longtime Play Lab panelist Jayne Wenger for her nearly two decades of service. It will be presented on Saturday, June 13, at 5:00 p.m. 

Jayne Wenger is a director and dramaturg whose exclusive focus is the development of new works for the theater. Her work is interdisciplinary, encompassing opera, dance, solo performance, new music, and site-specific collaborations.  She is the past Artistic Director of the Bay Area Playwrights Foundation and Women’s Ensemble of New York.  She was the original director and dramaturg for The Winter Bear Project, written by Anne Hanley, an on-going performing arts and social outreach initiative focused on teen suicide in rural Native Alaskan communities. She has collaborated with many playwrights and performers from Alaska including Arlitia Jones, Schatzie Schaefers, and Sandy Harper, among many other talented artists. She has been working for over 30 years with longtime collaborator Deke Weaver; her current work with Deke is his new multi-media performance piece entitled FOREST, the sixth installment of his lifetime work, The Unreliable Bestiary (www.unreliablebestiary.org, which will premiere at the University of Illinois in 2026. Recent projects include a November 2025 dance/theater piece My Obsession with Hamletmachine by Amy Lewis;  and direction/dramaturgy for two new solo works by Margery Krietman. Currently touring are Blues is a Woman by Pamela Rose; and Colette Uncensored by Lorri Holt and Zack Rogow.  Other notable past projects are Men Think They Are Better Than Grass with the Deborah Slater Dance Theater;  Vivien Straus’ solo show about the Straus Family Dairy and her mother Ellen’s work to save the farms along the coast of West Marin from overdevelopment, which was performed in the family barn in Marin County; Loving Janis, a solo work with music by Kyra Gordon focused on the lives of Janis Joplin and Janis Ian; The Lariat, an opera about colonial Spaniards' destruction of the California Esselen Native American world, by Lisa Scola Prosek; and Michelle Carter’s Rose In America.  She wrote the libretto for Neuromancer, an opera adapted from William Gibson’s novel.  Among her most gratifying projects over the years are You Can’t Get There From Here written and performed by Anne Galjour, focused on the class divide in America, and Becoming Grace a staged adaptation of the writing and poems of anti-war activist Grace Paley written and performed by Naomi Newman. She is an alumna of Djerassi Resident Artist Program; a frequent guest artist and advisory board member for The Valdez Theatre Conference; has taught at ArtWorkshop International in Assisi, Italy; and is an annual guest artist at San Francisco State University teaching dramaturgy and new play direction.  She is a member of the Dramatists Guild, VP for the Greater Metro Bay Area for the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas and the League of Professional Theater Women and a board member of Playwrights Foundation.  From 2018 to 2022 she was the Director of Creative Process for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival.   She works privately with playwrights across the country.